AI voice agents for small businesses: what they do and what they cost

Start with calls that have a known outcome: book, reschedule, confirm, answer a fact, take a message. These are 60 to 80% of inbound volume for clinics, workshops, salons, property managers and B2B service firms. Leave complaints and negotiations to people, at least at first.

Speech recognition for Hungarian reached production quality in 2024 and improved further through 2025. In our tests on real call recordings, name and address capture is the remaining weak spot, so the agent spells them back and confirms. Mixed Hungarian-English, common in tech and hospitality, is handled without configuration.

Three cost lines: telephony (a Hungarian number and per-minute rates), model usage (speech-to-text, the language model, text-to-speech) and the build. The first two are usage-based and typically land at a fraction of a euro per conversation minute. The build is a fixed price for a scoped first version, followed by a monthly fee for hosting, monitoring and tuning.

Tell callers they are speaking with an AI. Record calls only with notice and a lawful basis. Keep transcripts for a defined period. Sign a data processing agreement with every provider in the chain. The EU AI Act's transparency rules and the GDPR both apply, and both are manageable in a two-week build.